


Technological Advances

by SuburbanSun



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Awkward Flirting, Co-workers, F/M, Non-SHIELD AU, Workplace Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-18
Updated: 2015-06-18
Packaged: 2018-04-05 01:32:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,739
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4160562
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SuburbanSun/pseuds/SuburbanSun
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What do you do when it’s your first day on the job and you’ve got a crush on the IT guy? If you’re Jemma Simmons, you make a plan.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Technological Advances

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ardentaislinn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ardentaislinn/gifts).



> Happy happy birthday, Aislinn! This idea came as an amalgamation of two different prompts on your AU prompts list: "i keep calling tech support because you’re helpful and also your voice is really cute AU" and "The new handyman’s hot so I’m gonna keep breaking stuff AU." I hope you like it!

“Excuse me, Melinda, is it? Can I ask you a question?” Jemma Simmons craned her neck to see over her cubicle wall. The woman at the adjacent desk tilted her head toward Jemma.

“May.”

Jemma furrowed her brow. _Wow, guess I’m sitting next to the grammar police._ “I’m sorry. _May_ I ask you a question?” The woman finally turned to look at her, face impassive, and nodded once.

“I’m so sorry to bother you, but I was just wondering-- is your internet working? Mine seems to have-- well, stopped.”

The woman looked back at her screen and clicked a few times. “Yes.”

“Yes, as in yours is working? Or yes, as in yours has also stopped?”

Instead of responding, Melinda just plucked a worn yellow Post-It note from the wall of her cubicle and passed it over the wall to Jemma. It had a phone number scrawled in messy handwriting underneath two letters: “IT.”

“So I should just--” Jemma looked up from the note and saw that Melinda had put on a pair of large, noise-canceling headphones, and had focused her full attention on her triple-monitor setup. Jemma nodded to herself. “Okay, I’ll just… give them a call, then. Thanks.”

\---

“So it was working, and then all of a sudden it wasn’t,” Jemma explained to the man IT had sent to help her. He’d taken over her seat, and she stood behind him in her small cube, unsure what to do with her hands. It didn’t exactly help her awkward first-day jitters that he was quite cute.

“Did you try restarting your system?” he asked in a lovely Scottish accent that did funny things to Jemma’s insides.

“What? Oh! Um, no, not exactly.”

The man-- Fitz, he’d introduced himself as Fitz-- sighed. “Then there’s your problem.” He swiftly began shutting down windows in order to restart.

“I’m sorry-- Of course I know to do that. I’m just a bit nervous. It’s my first day here.”

He clicked the button to restart and turned to look up at her as her screen went black. When he met her gaze, his eyes widened as if it were the first time he’d actually noticed her. And perhaps it was-- after all, when he’d walked into her cube, his eyes had been firmly planted on the enormous tablet he carried. “It’s alright. Um. Welcome to the company.”

“Thanks,” she said softly, her eyes fixed on his incredibly blue ones. A long moment passed as they just took each other in, him sitting low in her desk chair and her standing there shifting from one foot to the other. She opened her mouth to say something-- _Ask him how he likes it here. Ask him anything_.-- but just as she did, she was interrupted by the telltale sound alerting them both that her computer had restarted. The moment was over.

Fitz drew his attention to her screen, and with a couple of quick clicks, Chrome was pulled up and her home page had loaded properly. He stood up, and suddenly they were face to face in the small cube. Jemma’s eyes flitted from across his face, down to his mouth, then back up to his eyes. She was very aware of how close he was.

He cleared his throat, drawing her eyes to his mouth once again. _Is it hot in here? It feels hot_. She took the tiniest step closer to him, as if she couldn’t stop herself.

“Um…” he began.

“Yes?” Her voice sounded just a bit deeper than usual to her own ears.

“Can I…”

“Yes?”

“Get by you? I need to-- I have another call to get to.”

She was finally able to break his gaze, and the rest of the world came back into focus. A telephone rang a few desks away, and she realized how very exposed they were, standing in the middle of a cube that only reached mid-chest. Face flushed with embarrassment, she was thankful to see that Melinda was still focused on her screens, and no one else in the office bullpen seemed to be paying them any mind.

“Sorry! So sorry.” She slid to the side, flattening herself against her cube wall and letting him pass. He paused right outside the cubicle, looking back at her.

“Jemma, right?” She nodded. “Welcome, again. It’s, ah.” He scratched at the side of his neck, and she thought maybe _he_ was the one blushing now. “Good to have you. Really good. Thanks.” After a beat, he spun around and left, tri-fold tablet in hand.

Jemma sank into her desk chair and stared at her monitor for a moment, then let her head fall to her desk. _Oh god._  She let out a sigh. _I have a crush at work._

\---

She didn’t see him again for three days, and she couldn’t decide if that was a good thing or a bad one. Then, as she was booting up her computer one morning, he appeared at her cube entrance.

“Antivirus.”

“What?” She swiveled in her chair, surprised to see him.

“Sorry. Um, I need to update your antivirus. It’s out of date. Woefully out of date, in fact.”

“Oh!” She stood up, gesturing for him to take her seat again. “We can’t have that.”

“No, we can’t.” He began to work as she mentally instructed herself not to embarrass herself this time. “So, you like Doctor Who?”

“Yes! How did you know?”

He nodded to the small TARDIS figurine that sat at the base of her monitor. “I have one too.”

She excitedly asked him what he thought about the new Doctor, which led to a ten minute conversation on the merits of Twelve as compared to the previous incarnations. When the antivirus update had completed and he left her cube with a wave, she noticed that he didn’t stop by Melinda’s to update hers-- or anyone else’s, for that matter.

Which gave Jemma an idea.

\---

“So the file just… deleted itself?”

Jemma nodded. “One second it was there, and then _poof_. No more file.”

Fitz frowned at the monitor, typing in a command and turning back to her. “And you absolutely need it back? You can’t recreate it?”

“No! I mean, not without _several_ hours of work. _Long_ hours. I think the only thing we can do is spend some time hunting for it until we find it.”

He nodded gravely, opening a few windows and beginning the search (which would ultimately prove fruitless, as the file had never existed to begin with-- but he needn’t know that). Jemma leaned back against her filing cabinet. “So, what are your thoughts on the current Doctor’s companions?”

They never found the missing file, but over the course of an hour, she found out his favorite companion, favorite episode, and favorite Doctor catchphrase, so she chalked the visit up to a success.

\--

Two days later, the problem was one of peripherals. Her mouse had stopped working suddenly-- when she’d removed its batteries and tucked them in her pocket.

“The receiver seems to be plugged into the right port…”

“I also just replaced the batteries,” she told him. “So it can’t be that.”

“Guess we’ll have to test out a few options,” he said. She thought she saw him lift the mouse a couple of centimeters above the desk, as if weighing it in his hand, but couldn’t be sure. If he noticed anything odd, he didn’t mention it, and the next 30 minutes were spent branching out from the Whoniverse into the other movies and TV shows they both enjoyed (the list of which, Jemma was pleased to discover, was quite long).

As he stood to leave-- only because he’d gotten a text message from another colleague who needed his assistance-- he nodded to the mouse. “Maybe you got a pair of faulty batteries. Try replacing them and see if it works.”

“Will do!” she said cheerily.

\--

“Someone must have pranked me,” she explained as he stared down at her keyboard, trying not to laugh. In reality, she’d gotten to work early and spent a quarter of an hour rearranging all the letter keys.

“That’s pretty mean of someone, pranking the new girl.”

“My thoughts exactly.”

“Well,” he started, looking up at her. “I’m not entirely sure if you needed IT help for this one.”

 _Oh no_.

“I just thought, well, I would hate to short something out… or to misplace a letter. Really, any damage to company tech equipment is an IT issue, wouldn't you say?”

He shrugged, a smile on his face, and she laughed at herself. She had to admit to herself that her excuses were getting a tad thin. Even Melinda had said something the day prior-- “Single-handedly improving our IT department’s job security, I see.” It was hard to be bothered, though, when she and Fitz settled once more into a conversation that was simultaneously comfortable and flirtatious.

It likely shouldn’t have taken him more than 15 minutes to reassemble her keyboard-- after all, it had only taken her as much time to meticulously pull it apart-- but he managed to make it last 30.  When he got up from her desk this time, he stood between it and her for a moment and wouldn’t quite meet her eyes.

“So, ah. You’ve got my number. Obviously.”

She tilted her head to the side. “Yes, I do.”

“Right. So, just call me? If you need anything… else?”

“I always do,” she said with a smile. He smiled back, but still had a strange look on his face. _Did I say something wrong?_

With a nod and a wave, he quickly shifted away from her desk and out of her cubicle. She watched him go, shrugging to herself.

_9:40. Better actually get to work, Jemma._

As she sat down at her desk, her eyes were drawn to her newly-repaired keyboard, and she couldn’t help breaking out into a grin. He _had_ rearranged the keys from the random assortment she’d created, but hadn’t quite put it _completely_ back to normal:

Q W H R G Y U I O P  
 F S **D A T E ?** K L  
  Z X C V B N M

She waited three minutes-- the amount of time she estimated it would take him to walk downstairs back to the IT office-- before picking up her phone and dialing.

“Hi, Fitz? I think I’m going to need some more help… maybe this Friday?”

**Author's Note:**

> Want to chat on Tumblr? I'm unbreakablejemmasimmons over there!


End file.
